Documentary: There Are No Fakes

2019 documentary about the artwork and controversy of an Indigenous Canadian painter named Norval Morriseau.

Apparently there are THOUSANDS of fake Morriseaus on the market, and a lot of Canadian galleries have relied on them for income for years. There are lawsuits flying everywhere over what's fake and what isn't, and defamation.  

Here's the thing.  Morriseau was a primitivist, his work was pretty childlike.  Most of the fakes are better art than what is claimed to be real.  Morriseau was a drunk and profligate gay and spent some time in jail, so his reputation isn't exactly sterling. Most of the fakes were apparently created, possibly with the artist’s tacit approval, by relatives of his, brothers or nephews. Like Dali and Warhol he blurred the line between “reproductions” and “factory art”’and “fakes” because all he cared about was drugs and alcohol.  All these art dealers suing each other over this utter crap art, it just makes the whole sordid story really ironic.

It reminds me of the story of one of the Koch brothers buying fake vintage wine.  I mean, rich guys collecting stuff not because they like it, but because they hope it will appreciate.  If a few of them get screwed, that's a good thing, right?

Or the Tiger King guy, Joe Exotic?  All this hoopla over who's being screwed over by whom, but once you dig into it a little, they're all scumbags.  Everybody is screwing everybody. Just a cesspool of negativity.

Money and drugs, drugs and money.

The M.C. Escher museum in The Hague, which I visited when I was in Holland in 2014, is full of photocopies of the original art. They’re designed to be indistinguishable from the originals — which after all, were widely reproduced by the artist during his lifetime.

Some historians and museum keepers are all up in arms about displaying “posters” to admissions-paying guests. I don’t see the point myself. Art is art.

When I was there, before the revelation, it seemed to me that many of the prints looked like reproductions — they were too perfect, too flat. And when I visited the Hieronymus Bosch museum in ‘s-Hertogenbosch, the sign on the front door said all the artwork was lifesize reproductions. I didn’t mind a bit.